After the debacle that was my use of Twitter to predict the outcome of American Idol, I decided to attempt redemption in the form of another online tool.  After doing some research, I realized that many fans of reality television were using grids made on Wikipedia to calculate statistics used for elimination predictions.  Statistics can be created for any show that uses a high-low-win system or a straight callout order system.  Donning my nerd cap, I delved into the world of reality television and Wikipedia articles to see if I could discover their true usability.

(more…)

Todd gave me a beta invite to the new bookmarking site Mento this morning.  He really likes it, and thinks that it is del.icio.us on steroids.  I agree.

More or less the sites are very similar in their core functionality — to bookmark sites with the potential to categorize and share them.  However, Mento has added a few bells and whistles.

While del.icio.us is much more spartan in its design (which isn't necessarily bad –compare Google to Yahoo!), Mento has a lot more graphics and more friendly user interface.  I personally don't mind a spartan site, but Mento is refreshing.  For those who are new to the bookmarking game, they probably would find Mento easier to use.

Another cool bell and whistle that Mento has added is the ability to get a customized screen shot (whole or partial) of a web page that one is bookmarking.  I must admit that this is way cool.  A picture is worth a thousand words, and bookmarking sites aren't made for tomes about links.  Further, it is easy to do.  The tool pops up in one's browser, and the instructions are very clear what to do.

Mento is also gracious enough to understand that we weren't born for the sole purpose of using it.  That's why it allows users to export links from it to other bookmarking sites like del.icio.us, Ma.gnolia, and tumblr.  That's pretty generous.  Of course, can or will also export links to sites like Facebook, which makes perfect sense since bookmarking is a complementary activity to social networking.

If that's not good enough, Mento also enables you to filter the links that your connections can send you or that you'll see as you peruse their bookmarks.  For instance, if Todd tags something "battlestargalactica," I can choose not to see these links.  No offence meant, but I'm a Star Trek guy.  Likewise you can make sure that pages from a certain site are included in what you see.  That's pretty nifty.   

The site is still in beta — thus, a work-in-progress.  But it seems cool to me.  If you would like an invite to test the site, either leave a comment below or send us a direct message through The Bivings Group's Twitter page.

I posted a link on our Twitter account a few days back about Jim Brady from the Washington Post’s call for commenters on newspaper websites to post using their real names.  In doing away with anonymous commenting, he is hoping to improve the generally low level of discourse you find on many media sites.  Here is his justification:

I think part of the problem is that people aren’t held accountable on the Web.  People say things online they would never say when disagreeing with someone at the dinner table. I think heated debate is fine, but when there are (flame wars), many people won’t take part for fear they will be attacked and bashed over the head with the (Internet-equivalent) of a steel pipe.

I have mixed feelings about this.  On the one hand, I think there is a tradition of respecting anonymity on the Internet that has value, and I am generally opposed to putting up barriers that hinder discussion.  On the other hand, the comment sections on many newspaper website are completely broken and I think Brady’s solution would probably work.

Anyway, the whole issue got me thinking about steps I think media companies should take to improve their comments sections, short of requiring people to post using their real names.  Below are my ideas based on my experience in trying to manage active comments areas for a variety of clients (we don’t have a comment problem on our own site so we haven’t taken a lot of these steps here):

(more…)

If you own a computer and have a disposable income, chances are good that you have bought something via Amazon.com, a well-known site dedicated to being the Internet's largest store.  The site boasts many features, including discount prices, lists of recommendations for frequent users, and intuitive search features.  A past blog post on The Bivings Report highlights one of Amazon's recent user-friendly upgrades.

(more…)

In our post announcing the launch of our Bivings Twitter account, I mentioned being inspired by the way other companies/organizations are using Twitter (what is Twitter?). The organization that I was thinking of specifically when I launched our account was Zappos.com. Lots of organizations are jumping on the Twitter bandwagon and using the tool to publish RSS feeds and have one way conversations. But very few at this point are using Twitter to actually engage with customers and stakeholders. Zappos.com is one of the few.

Zappos has set up their own Twitter micro site to highlight the company’s use of Twitter. The site features:

• A “Beginners Guide to Twitter” that does a good job of explaining what Twitter is exactly.
• A leaderboard, sorted by number of followers, that lists all Zappos.com employee Twitter accounts (252 of them). By doing this, Zappos is empowering all their employees to engage with customers through Twitter.
• A reverse chronological list of all employee tweets.
• A reverse chronological list of all Zappos.com mentions on Twitter.

Importantly, Zappos.com CEO Tony Hsieh is the company’s most active and followed Twitter user. Just in the last few days, he has used his account to:

• Share some details about what he’s up to personally and professionally.
• Provide some behind the scenes info regarding what its like to work at Zappos.com.
• Launch a Twitter contest asking people to help them rewrite their confirmation emails.
• Incubate an idea for polling customers on Twitter.
• Explain why he is using Twitter.

Don’t believe they are into it? Check out Tony’s business cards.

Zappos.com is successfully using Twitter to put a human face on the company and engage with customers more deeply. I’m impressed. If we do half as well with our own Twitter account, I’ll be happy.

An interesting study crossed my screen recently.  According to this press release, media agency Starcom USA, behavioral targeting network Tacoda, and digital consumer insight company comScore collaborated on a research study whose results call into question how well click rates on ads measure a consumer base.

The study states that only 6% of the total Internet population represents 50% of the clicks on ads.  Online media companies may use click rates as points of negotiation with their clients, but if this study is accurate, that measurement is not a clear view of how many people are seeing these ads.  Further measurements from the study show no correlation between display ad clicks and brand metrics, and show no connection between measured attitude towards a brand and the number of times an ad for that brand was clicked.

So who are these clickers?  Reading some forums concerning the topic led to some interesting, and occasionally probably ideas:

• Young children that may click more than they should
• Overly frugal consumers fiendishly looking for a great deal
• First time Internet users
• Employees who click on their own ads to raise metrics
• Professional ‘ad clickers' who are hired to click to raise metrics

The ‘Heavy Clicker' is profiled in the study.  These users are typically between the ages of 25-44 and households with an income under $40000.  They also spend four times more time online than the typical Internet user and are more likely to visit auctions, gambling, and career services sites.  Clearly, these are not typical Internet users, nor are they the type of people that many of the above suggestions implied.

As I mentioned in a past blog post, measuring click rates is archaic and unnecessary.  Ads on the Internet are not what they were promised to be-noninvasive and simple.

I think that it's actually sad that what could have been a great aspect of the Internet (essentially, selectable commercials) has been destroyed thanks to pop-up ads, spam, scams, and the need for online metrics.  It's time to move on to a new form of online advertising.

One of my friends sent me a link to a clip from a BBC comedy show named The Wall this morning.  This Facebook in the real world clip, which is found on Andrew Sullivan’s Daily Dish blog on The Atlantic’s site, shows a man knocking on an old acquaintance’s door. 

The visitor then proceeds to poke the bewildered bloke, tells him that they used to know each other but didn’t get along, requests that he be his friend, etc. while someone else posts embarrassing pictures on the wall of this bloke’s house for the rest of his friends to see.

As weird as this sounds, I think it is important for us to remember what you actually do on a social networking site.  While social networks are very useful, we must remember that sometimes we behave in ways that we would not do in real life.  That’s why this video is particularly funny and helpful for use to remember what exactly we’re doing on Facebook, MySpace, and similar sites.

Fledging company UserVoice is attempting to provide focus groups to those companies that cannot afford focus groups.  The site's general idea is to moderate user ideas and complaints by means of formal comment boxes, polls, and ranking systems.  The three-person ‘Team UserVoice' is quoted as saying, "UserVoice adds structure to feedback and reduces the overhead of an honest dialog with our users - It creates a market around good ideas so we get more quality than quantity."

The interface is currently in its public beta stage, allowing (free of charge) access to its platform.  Those who sign up can create a page for their company, product, project, or even blog.  UserVoice just recently released the ability to add custom CSS to a company's page as well as c-name inclusion for a completely transparent user experience.  This means that the customer never perceives that they are on another site.  The idea is to put the UserVoice widget on the company's official site and allow users to comment on their company or specific products.  The company can then do several things:

1. Track user ideas as other users vote on them
2. Provide official responses to comments
3. Mark an idea as ‘planned'
4. Push out new features that users want
5. Collect fan mail

The new site has gained a lot of attention, but I question whether this new company can do things that are not already being done.  Sites like FeVote, Get Satisfaction, and Sales Force are already doing many of the things with which UserVoice claims to be able to help.  The only unique feature that I can discern is that UserVoice allows companies to create a specific page for themselves.  The effort seems to be made in keeping the comments more regulated and organized than the previously mentioned sites, but will that cause users to be less free with their suggestions and comments?  I applaud the company for creating a way for small to medium-sized businesses to have their own ‘focus groups' but it is going to be a couple of months before we will be able to decide if UserVoice shouts or gets silenced.

At the New Communications Forum conference last week, Chris O’Brien from the San Jose Mercury News mentioned during a presentation that 2/3rds of the traffic to the paper’s website comes from news aggregators (like Google News) and search engines.  This figure was higher than I expected, so I mentally filed away the tidbit to write about at some point.

Then today I came across a site called Newsknife, which breaks down which newspaper websites have the most articles appear in Google News.  I found this fascinating, so I quickly compared the twenty five newspapers that appeared most often in Google News with a list of the twenty five largest newspapers in terms of print circulation.  A couple of quick things jumped out at me:

• The Mercury News, Washington Times and Akron Beacon Journal were the papers that performed the best in Google News as compared to their print circulation.  For the Mercury News and Washington Times, I’d guess they do well because both papers have a lot of content niche news topics (silicon valley and politics) that are very popular on time.  So it makes sense that Google News might have a lot of their stories.  I have no idea why the Akron Beacon Journal is in Google News so much.
• The Wall Street Journal and Rocky Mountain News were the largest newspapers that did not appear on the list of top newspapers sites in Google News.  I suspect the Journal will start showing up soon given their recent deal with Google.  I don’t know what is going on with the Rocky Mountain News.

However, I was mostly left slightly baffled as to what to make of the data and why certain sites performed better than others.  How important is optimizing for Google News?  What is the impact of registration walls?  How important is the topics that are covered?  I think these questions are important to answers, as, based on the figures from the Mercury News, performance in search engines and news aggregators plays a huge role in the success or failure of a newspapers online program.  I’ll try to write more on this later after the data has a chance to sink in.

Anyway, below is the raw data.  Please share any thoughts you have in the comments.

Around a year ago, I registered the username “bivings” on the micro-blogging platform Twitter on behalf of our firm, The Bivings Group. Our original intent in creating the account was to squat the username and protect our brand. We didn’t really intend to do anything with it.

This week, we decided to start actively using our account for a couple of reasons:

1. More and more, we’ve been counseling our clients to experiment with Twitter. It feels strange to give this advice when we aren’t using our own account effectively. “Doctor, heal thyself” as the saying goes.
2. Twitter doesn’t cost anything to use and the time investment required for us to update our account isn’t that great. So why not?
3. In the last few months, we’ve come across some great examples of companies using Twitter to further their brand. We were inspired by these success stories. Look for a blog post showing some examples later today.
4. Twitter isn’t mainstream yet, but it is on the cusp. It seemed like we should get in while the getting is good.
5. Lots of us here are already using Twitter and we like it. We thought thought it would be fun to launch a Bivings account we update collectively.

In terms of content, here is what you can expect from our Twitter account.

1. We’ll be automatically publishing all our blog posts to the account using Twitterfeed. If this is all we did on Twitter, it would be worthwhile. As I’ve started using Twitter more heavily the last few months, the time I spend reading RSS feeds has dropped dramatically. I discover stuff to read on Twitter instead. I think others are doing the same. Twitter is becoming an important distribution channel for content.
2. We’ll post links to sites we launch and updates on things we are working on.
3. We’ll post short, quick thoughts that we don’t want to try to stretch out into full blog posts.
4. We’ll enter into discussions with people we follow on Twitter.

Anyway, you can access our account here. Please follow us! We’ll do our best to be interesting.

And if you have any suggestions as to people we should be following, leave them in the comments.

3G smart phone options abound, as Apple gets set to unveil its 3G solution at its Worldwide Developers Conference June 9, according to analysts. But with all the pub the iPhone gets, you’d think it was the only game in town. Not so.

There are some excellent alternatives to the iPhone, led by mobile phone giant Nokia. After considerable deliberation, I went with the Nokia N95 8GB, which has been available for some time. It doesn’t match the 16 GB of space the next iPhone will have, but if you want 3G and you want it now, this is a viable option. The N95 was first with built-in GPS navigation, and the 5 megapixel digital camera is a major advantage over the iPhone’s 2 megapixels . My digital camera hasn’t left the house since I bought this phone. I also love the option of listening to the built-in FM radio, a feature Apple – widely known for its musical prowess – inexplicably left out. And when my battery eventually goes bad, I can simply get a new one. Not so with the sleeker iPhone… as you may already know, the fact that its lithium ion battery is built in and not removable has caused quite a stir with consumers. (more…)

Let's face it; China needs to bolster its reputation before the Summer Olympics begin.  Otherwise, the several countries that are already considering boycotting may, in fact, do so.  In my opinion, it would be a shame if a past representation of political and economical unity were to be halted.  After all, if this one year is a bust, future Olympic games may follow in failure.

PRWeek recently ran an article in their online resource that the Chinese government was interviewing potential US and UK-based PR firms in the hopes to gain some positive pre-game press, prior to the events.  However, no PR firm has admitted to being in the bid war for this lucrative account.

(more…)

At the New Communications Forum conference I attended last week, Twitter was the topic of a great deal of discussion.  During panels and hallway chats, three things became really clear to me:

(1) There are a lot of smart people who have no idea what Twitter is, or who only know about it in the vaguest sense.

(2) Hard core Twitter users assume that everyone knows about it in the same way that everyone knows about YouTube or Facebook.  They don’t.   Twitter hasn’t hit the mainstream yet, although it is knocking on the door.   Check out this Compete graph:

(3) Twitter is really hard to explain to people.  You pretty much have to just break out the laptop and show the thing. 

We’ve been writing a great deal about Twitter here on our blog, and I fear that we have done so in a way that is inaccessible to folks that haven’t checked out the tool yet.  So below is some background info that hopefully helps out newbies and also Twitter vets trying to explain it to folks.

(more…)

Recently, I was considering trading in my broken iPod for another type of MP3 player…that is; until I ran across an article from Wired stating that I'd better hold on to at least one Apple product.

According to InStat, by 2012, 40% of all music purchased is going to come from digital music downloads.  Most impressively, the vast majority of those downloads come from Apple iTunes.  Almost 30% of the computers in the world have the download software, according to Digital Music News.

I personally buy nearly all of my music through iTunes.  For me, it seems easy, safe, and quick.  I like the fact that I can purchase a single song from an album, and the fact that an entire album on iTunes is typically less expensive than a CD.  Do I hate the fact that Apple controls yet another aspect of the computer market? Yes.  Will that hatred stop me from downloading the latest free single of the week? No.

It will be interesting to see if these predictions from InStat and Wired are correct.  I would like to also predict that by 2012, Apple will have released another five ‘upgrades' to the design of the iPod.

I gave a presentation earlier today at the New Communications Forum conference in Santa Rosa, CA on how well traditional media (newspapers and magazines) are adapting their Internet programs based on the challenges presented by the web and social media.

During my talk, I reviewed the results of our newspaper and magazine studies that examined the Web 2.0 features these media properties include on their websites.  I also reviewed examples of some of the cooler things media organizations are doing on the web. 

When giving these presentations, you try to force yourself to reach some sort of coherent conclusion.  In the case of my presentation, I have to try to answer this question: “What will newspaper and magazine websites look like in five  years?”  The truth is that I don’t know and I don’t really think anyone does. 

Our studies tell the story of an industry in transition.   

Some bigger properties, like the Washington Post and New York Times, have the budgets and commitment from management to experiment.  They launch new web programs and cut the ones that don’t work and keep the ones that do.  Some smaller papers, presumably unencumbered by layers of bureaucracy, are also experimenting and doing great things.   Other publications are suffering from institutional inertia and not doing much of anything.  Web-based companies like Digg and Techmeme are breaking their own ground.

What newspapers websites look like in five years will be the story of these various experiments.

For those of you that are gluttons for punishment, my presentation is embedded below.  As you’ll see, in the future I should probably take help from our design team.  Notes regarding some of the slides are embedded beneath the slide deck.

(more…)